Refining the duration and frame rate of a time-lapse sequence with Adobe Photoshop

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Another method of assembling a time-lapse sequence is to use Adobe Photoshop. For an easy workflow, you need to have Photoshop CS6 or newer. How do you refine the duration and frame rate? In this video, author Richard Harrington walks you through how to a

- Now that we've got the clip inside our Photoshop document,we need to do a little bit of additional processing.First off, realize that the files aren't actually embedded.This is just a link.When I save this Photoshop document,it's basically a set of instructionspointing to the folder where all the other images are.As such, I generally find it a good ideato save the Photoshop documentnear the same location as the original files.I'm going to choose file save as.

Let's store this in the same folder.We'll call this one VOF, for value of fire, one.I'll save this as a Photoshop document.When I click okay, the Photoshop file is written to disk.It doesn't actually contain anything, however,It just simply references these other filesthat are on the disk.One of the things you might want to controlis the frame rate of your material.For example, we could adjust the timeline frame rate hereto control what happens with the actual rendered file.

For this, I'll go to set time line frame rate.You can choose different pop-up lists.For example, I'm going to go with 23.976,for 24 P, which works quite well on the web.I'm going to click okay.You might notice that things changed down herein the timeline, but the duration didn't actually change.As such, you might want to select the video layerand then choose layer, video layers,and assign the frame rate.I'll go to interpret footage.

In this case, since we loaded the still frames in,I need to tell Photoshop how to handle those.I'm going to set this to also 23.976.Now, the two frame rates match.This gives us the ability to work with the material.We could adjust this and make things shorter or longer,but what's important here is that the two items match.Now that the sequence timeline is set to 23.976,and the footage is set to the same frame rate,I actually have three seconds worth of material.

That's because we imported 72 frames.If you're doing a real time lapse sequence,you'd likely import more frames than this.But remember, we reduced the amountof frames you had to download in order to follow along.Now that we've got the frame rates to match up,we're ready to move on to sizing the content.

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Released

8/15/2017

Learn how to speed up time and create compelling visual effects with time-lapse photography. Join Rich Harrington in the field as he captures nature's patterns at Red Rock Canyon in southwestern Nevada, and shows how to frame your scene and choose the proper camera settings. He shows you how to capture great images, whether you're using a DSLR camera and a motorized slider or just a smartphone you have handy. Then join him back in the studio to transform your still footage into a storytelling time-lapse video, using tools like Camera Raw, Photoshop, After Effects, Premiere Pro, and Final Cut Pro.